


You Had A Match

by Skua Grey (Skuabird)



Category: Gorillaz
Genre: Also a depiction of violence/heavy bad feels which may be disturbing in chapter two so be warned, Alternate Universe - Daemons, And trigger warning for suicide mention at the end of chapter three, Elements of the HDM books show up in chapter two, Gen, I didn't make the implied Dessel too heavy-handed did I?, MAYBE implied 2Nu towards the end of chapter three, Minor use of swear words, Russel is Noodle's father figure essentially, Second-person narration and loads of introspection ahoy, though not exactly enough to warrant calling this a proper crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-06-08 00:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6831922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skuabird/pseuds/Skua%20Grey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All her life, Noodle has had to rely mostly on her own strength as she faced the world.  But she didn't face it alone, for her soul was beside her.<br/>(Basically, this is my imagining of what Noods' life would have been like if she had a daemon.  Because this fandom needs a daemon AU, dammit!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

There have been two things you’ve always known about yourself, the only things that were ever truly yours in all the world. They were there beside you in the very beginning, when you awoke with crate boards around you and the voices of strangers beyond, and all that you are now originally began with them. First, you had a guitar, which told you you were a musician. Second, you had a daemon, and that told you all the rest.

He had no name you could recall in the beginning, and he wouldn’t have one for months after that (even long after you learned your own name), but he didn’t need one - you simply knew him as a daemon utterly unlike any other. He’d proven that to you when you met your future bandmates for the very first time, when he’d helped you to put on such a display of shredding and martial arts and leaping through the air that the three strange men before you had no choice but to take you in; you knew then that he was made of fire, that he was a shooting star born to make others watch and weep at his matchless beauty. There was boldness and pride in everything he did - from the way he strode and pranced along everywhere he went, to his effortless flickering between hundreds of different forms each day (bat, crane, cobra, tiger, weasel, swift, hare-baboon-deer-dragonfly, all colored as bright and warm as the sun), to the way he could take the strings of your Gibson and weave riffs that could rival yours in style. Your daemon was daytime and courage and dancing come together to be matter, a daemon to whom no other could hope to compare. 

But he was far more than a spark-spitting firecracker, of course. He was also a candle whose light guided you through the dark, chaotic room you had all of a sudden woken up in. He cheered you up in-between all the exhausting practice sessions, reminding you to laugh with antics such as sneaking up behind the smelly dark-haired man’s raven daemon and scaring her into over-the-top fits of anger (she, like her human, was quite an amusing sight when pissed - her oily plumage would fluff out to make her look twice her size, and she’d croak and squawk a thousand different curses at your little daemon as she chased him around on madly-flapping wild-feathered wings). He banished your fear whenever you walked through Kong’s dismal graveyards or shadow-shrouded corridors, letting you cling to the fur of whatever big predator he was as he padded coolly and confidently alongside you. And on those nights when you lay in bed and let your mind wonder where you came from, who you might have been before all of this, he would lick your cheek and tell you you mustn’t worry about it yet - it was a secret to be learned some other time, and you had plenty of time for that, since you were only eight years old.

Back then, the only name he needed was "matchstick."

\---  
It wasn’t long, of course, before Gorillaz took off as a band. You played one gig at a venue somewhere, and you saw your dedication to quality musicianship pay off as company officials approached you that very night to sign the four of you onto their label. Becoming stars meant being thrown into a life that was now fast-paced as well as exhausting; the hours on the tourbus were long, the stadium-filling crowds were loud, and the questions asked by journalists were sometimes a bit too prying. But with your soul beside you, you melted into this existence just as smoothly as you did your first one, wowing audiences and answering interviewers and performing all the duties of being a celebrity in just such a way as to intrigue the masses. Besides, there was plenty of fun to be had now, especially with all of the new discoveries you made.

One of these things you learned was your daemon’s name. It came to you much the same way your own name did: by overhearing the others talk about it, just as you’d overheard them talking about “Noodle” and quickly figured out who they meant. You’d noticed that it was always Russel and his owl daemon who would whisper between themselves about “her echo,” for you were around Russel nearly all the time - he seemed a much safer and more approachable presence than your other two bandmates, and his Caden would always let your daemon coil around his neck as a blindsnake. You asked him about it after a concert one night, while the two of you sat at a table near an ice cream shop.

“Oh, that’s just Caden’s nickname for him,” he replied in what Japanese he knew, indicating the squirrel on your shoulder. “Do you remember how he’d always say 'noodle,' just like you did? It always sounded to us like he was echoing you. But it’s just a nickname,” he added, while the owl shuffled his talons and rustled his spotted wings. “It doesn’t have to be his name or anything.”

Echo. _Hibiki._ You tested the name on your tongue, and your daemon responded by launching from your shoulder and alighting on the table as a little pygmy owl, gazing back at you with wide, alert eyes. And that was how you knew it would stick.

\--  
After a while, you started to warm up to the other two as well. One can’t be stuck on a tourbus for large chunks of days upon days with someone and not become familiar with them. And you had to admit that, aside from everyone’s suffocating body musk, they weren’t very bad company.

Murdoc and Lilimit, for example, were sometimes tolerant of you. True, he still looked a tad annoyed when he was stuck alone with you, and the raven always stared at Hibiki down her crooked beak as if daring him to try to pull some trick on her. But sometimes, he would make a bit of conversation, usually with a joke about something or another; you hardly understood what he meant about “enjoying girls” or whatever, but he sounded amusing enough, so you liked to hear him talk. And, of course, he always seemed impressed when you got your guitar out and played the latest riff you’d been working on; even when he had bits of critique to give, they never sounded too scathing, so you had to be on at least peaceful terms with him.

2D’s presence was far more enjoyable, you remember. The two of you didn’t exchange too many words either, but he was always relaxed and amiable and very much unlike Murdoc towards you, and there was always something about your interactions that made them feel precious - some sense of unspoken connection reminiscent of the bond between human and daemon, some calm mutual understanding whether you were fiddling on instruments together or simply sitting in silence that could be described as _zen._ However, Hibiki did feel a bit frustrated with Thalia, the little loris who always clung to 2D’s back and never did much except stare around at everything with big, dazed eyes. Often, in an attempt to cheer her up, he would take on near-perfect imitations of her shape, right down to the unnatural bright blue of her fur; even she would emit a soft chuckle when he showed her, and that always seemed to satisfy him. 

And then you met Del. He was certainly quite the shock for numerous reasons when he first showed himself to you during the filming of the “Clint Eastwood” video - the darkening of the sky, his apparent heralding of a swarm of zombies, his lack of a daemon, the fact that Russel went blank and Caden fainted in a feathery heap when he appeared. But Hibiki was taken at once with his wacky character, and after a few moments, you were of the same mind. He was a reoccurring presence after that, and soon he, too, had become a companion of yours. He was always quite fun to be around, what with his funny reactions to losing bets and his encouraging of your daemon to try weirder and weirder shapes (you had never seen Hibiki as a T. rex or a three-headed hellhound before his arrival). He was always a mystery to you, though; he never talked about his life when he was still alive, and when you asked Russel about him, all you would get was that he was a very good friend. Hibiki suggested that you should at least go find his daemon and bring them back to him one day, and you agreed.

The months went by, and eventually, so did the years - songs were released, tours began and concluded, Gorillaz rose through the ranks of the world’s charts. The way the world constantly shifted around you was always staggering and sometimes stressful, but your brave little flame remained by your side and ever-cheerful through it all, soaring and somersaulting through each different sky as you looked on in awe. He would reassure you that all would be well, that you were succeeding with your life and that he could protect you from the overbearing crowds. And he had this feeling deep within himself, he told you, that you were destined for something great; he couldn't explain why, but he was sure that someday, you would start a revolution, sweeping through all the music world like a grassland wildfire and changing it all into something better. You just had to keep going, keep playing your heart out, keep rocking the fuck out of everything; and you told him that with a dragon as powerful as he next to you, the blaze you'd create would be like nothing ever seen or heard.

\--  
And indeed, nothing seemed to obscure this vision until the tour of Japan rolled around.

From the moment you overheard Murdoc discussing plans for it over the telephone, your mind was a constant buzz of excitement, and Hibiki’s form-flicking was more rapid than ever - he couldn’t keep a shape for anything over a moment, it seemed. At last, you were getting to visit your birthplace! You hadn’t found yourself thinking of your past identity at all over the past few months - gifts always seem to arrive when the recipients have forgotten about them, do they not? And now here it was, just as Hibiki had promised it would be, a chance to go back and learn more about yourself and fill a space in the puzzle of your identity which you had always sensed needed filling in spite of your daemon’s best assurances otherwise. Grand fantasies about what you might discover danced around in your thoughts in the weeks leading up to departure, and you could barely manage to contain either yourself or Hibiki (to the annoyance of many passengers) as you boarded the plane and soared up into the still-dark sky of an early morning.

But it was upon your arrival that trouble began. Oh, the island country was indeed full of beautiful land, and the first couple of concerts were pretty stellar. But this was when you started to have nightmares. Strange visions began to haunt your sleep, mere flashes of imagery that were nevertheless clouded over with fear and dread: in them, there were children just like you, except they were all standing in ranks and holding fearsome-looking guns, and they were engaged in brutal training exercises, and there were imposing figures in white labcoats staring down at them, flashes of government propaganda, glimpses of a room with a sort of guillotine-like device inside it, those same children entering that room and coming out altogether changed…

What was especially perplexing about these dreams was that somehow, they almost seemed like memories; you didn’t know why, but there was a familiarity to the faces of those nightmare-children, and that guillotine especially sent deep shivers through Hibiki’s being. You tried telling Russel about them, but he didn’t have any idea what they might have meant, so all he could do was tell you that they were just bad dreams (and deep down, you knew they weren’t). A few nights of waking up sweat-drenched later, and you were sleepless and short-fused, with Hibiki invariably crouching beside you as a porcupine. And as the tour went on, the night-demon haunting you brought more and more of these visions, each batch more disturbing than the last, and you woke up all the more sullen each morning…

\--  
You tried to enjoy your tour in spite of what you saw in your sleep, you really did. You knew you couldn’t just let a place as breathtaking as your motherland pass by while you were busy moping groggily, so you did your best to admire all of the vistas and give good performances and enjoy the curiosities of the cities you visited.

But try as you might have, you couldn’t immerse yourself, and that was for a whole different reason. You soon realized that this place simply didn’t invoke the feelings of love and connection you thought it should; it didn’t _feel_ like a motherland to you, there was no profound sense of welcome and belonging waiting for you at its breast. Hibiki, attempting to maintain his usual joviality, asked you if intense emotions really mattered that much when visiting one’s birthplace, and on a logical level, you supposed you could agree with him; but your doubts wouldn’t go away, because nothing here felt right, Japan just didn’t feel right…

Then one night, as the four of you were making your way through the middle of Tokyo with its too-busy streets and bright signs everywhere, the realization came to you. You weren’t really Japanese - not anymore, not since your present life began. You were an outsider, you were a _gaijin,_ you were not welcome; if you had any past here, it no longer mattered, and you certainly had no future within its shores. You were little more than a bastard, all alone, with no significance and no hope. Not even Hibiki - not even your relentlessly happy, persevering match - had anything to say that could have helped.

So you found yourself at the nadir of your mood, able to do nothing except slump dejectedly beside a pond in the garden near the hotel you were staying at, staring down at the water's dark glassy surface while your daemon’s white koi face gazed worriedly back up at you. You were so deep in thoughts about what this meant to you, who you could possibly be with no anchor, that you didn’t notice Russel strolling up to where you sat.

“You not feeling too good, baby?” came his deep, soft voice behind you. You looked up at him, and you slowly shook your head.

“I see. Well, how about I show you what I got for you this evening?” he asked. And when you glanced up again, you noticed that he had brought a rather large package with him. Hibiki shot out of the water and onto your knee, sitting upright in his frog form and staring alertly up at the man. You supposed that meant you were interested, and you nodded.

He let you open the box, and you were mightily surprised to find the parts of a jetpack inside. “Couldn’t believe how easy it was to obtain a functional jetpack here,” he remarked bemusedly as you admired your present. “But I figured it might be just the thing to cheer the two of you up, what with how fond your daemon seems to be of flying. Hope you like it, baby girl!”

You grinned widely for the first time in weeks and jumped into his arms for a hug before working on assembling your jetpack.

\--  
And a few minutes later, your existential crisis was all but forgotten amid the wind rushing past your ears and the giddiness in your stomach and all the other sensations which make up the experience of flight. Hibiki streaked along beside you like the comet he always was, his exhilaration adding to your own as he expressed his joy at this newfound dimension of freedom; he was a swallow, an osprey, a falcon, even a flame-colored dragon at one point as he wheeled and dove and swooped with wild abandon all around you, and you had a hard time keeping up with his reckless speed, so you often felt brief pangs of pain as he yanked at the bond between you (though these were only barely felt through the rush of your happiness). Any awe and fear felt by the people in the streets below was of no concern to you - in those moments, it was just you and your soul soaring around in the skies which were your domain, a dance floor cleared for one being to twirl about as two.

Finally, exhausted from flight, you simply hung there beneath the clouds and gazed down at all the spires and lights, Hibiki hovering beside you as a hummingbird. And it was there that the second epiphany you had that night came to nullify the first: it didn’t matter that you didn’t belong to Japan, because Japan didn’t matter to you. All you needed to anchor yourself to was inches away from your face and looking at you with smiling, starry eyes - so beautiful, so proud, a prince among daemons. You had a soul made of fire, and if that was all you had to go off of, then you could definitely more than manage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here's the first chapter of this little character study I'm working on! I hope you enjoyed it. ^.^
> 
> For the curious, here are all the daemons' names and forms, along with why I chose them:  
> *Murdoc's Lilimit is a common raven (because come on, it's pretty much canon). Ravens are clever and manipulative birds known for their playful antics, but also for their tendency to bully other birds around. Her name resulted from playing around with "lilim," the term for a kind of female demon.  
> *Russel's Caden is a barred owl, a symbol of wisdom, patience, and intuition (as well as death and the underworld). His name means "friend" in Arabic and "warrior spirit" in Welsh; it was the first name to pop into my head, and it stuck for some reason. ^^'  
> *2D's Thalia is a slender loris, an odd-looking nocturnal primate (because someone's gotta have a primate) known for its slow, deliberate (yet nervous) nature and its mistreatment in the exotic pet industry (no wonder she looks sad, eh?). Thalia was the name of the Greek muse of comedy, and that's the name I went with because I'm a lazy fuck.  
> *I have some ideas for what Noodle's Hibiki will settle as, but none of them are for certain, so I suppose I'll just work 'em out along the way. His name means "sound" or "echo"; rather appropriate, donchafink?
> 
> Concrit is much appreciated, and thanks in advance for any kudos! <3


	2. Chapter 2

Looking back on that night from your current perch of many years later, you can recognize your realization as an important step in your journey towards wisdom - perhaps even the very first, or at least the boon you needed before you could take your first. Figuring out that your daemon was all you could truly rely on certainly helped you to keep your head and dignity when the band split up in a different hotel room a few months later; as you would soon learn, you should have known it would be inevitable. Now that your schedule would no longer be dominated by the pressures of fame and artistry, you and Hibiki could see that you were in the midst of a vast and mysterious world, an ocean stretching out farther past your vision on all sides than you could ever guess and teeming with all kinds of monsters; but even though you and he were the only crew your little boat had, you didn’t feel the least bit daunted, and your little match was very much in the mood for sailing.

So the two of you became vagabonds. From that little hotel in New York, you conducted your own tour of the world, from North America to southern Africa and all around; you never ran into any of your bandmates, you hid your identity as best as you could, and you stayed far away from both Kong Studios and your home country. You felt like an explorer as you wandered the earth with your wandering albatross, mapping everywhere you went in your head and making notes of all you learned in your travels. And indeed, you felt you could fill a book with the sobering things you learned about the world over the year or so you spent lost - the kitsch and barrenness which consumed so much of it, the worldwide epidemic of addiction to meaningless sugar highs (and at last, you understood Murdoc's tragedy), the nature of violence and cruelty in all places, the way people everywhere seemed so dead to that which was good thanks to all of these distractions. Ugliness you could never have imagined mingled with moments of wordless beauty as you passed it all by on trains and on foot, and soon enough, you felt you had grown five times your age in wisdom; it felt rather nice, for all that you found yourself feeling jaded.

But there was one place left to go before you could know all you needed to, and you knew it. The strange nightmares you had in Japan were back after having ended months before, only they were now even stranger. And this time, you had this powerful feeling (despite Hibiki’s dissuasions) about where the answers for them lay. You were nervous about what you might find, you admitted to the mongoose in your arms as you waited at a bus stop in Mumbai; but you simply had to go back, and you reminded him that no matter what, you'd never forget you were his.

\--  
So you went back to Japan to find the secrets of your past, and as luck would have it, the secrets of your past found you. In a miraculous flash, you remembered exactly where to go the moment a restaurant patron unwittingly commanded the memory forth, and when you found Mr. Kyuzo, he proceeded to tell you everything.

Though you were well aware of Hibiki’s queasiness as he shuddered in your arms, you yourself took in every frank detail of the long tale with clinical dispassion: your intended purpose as a weapon from your genetically-engineered birth; the ruthless training and brainwashing you and the other test subjects were put through by government officials who privately wished to restore the Church’s rule; the dreadful fate awaiting you once your nameless daemon settled, the crude operation via guillotine which would remove your free will and turn you into the perfect zombi tykebomb (Hibiki actually fainted at this part, and he had to be revived by the tapping of Kyuzo's tarantula's legs on his lemur face); and finally, the way all of your siblings were thrown away, euthanized like stray mutts, when these Magisterium sympathizers were found out by higher-ups and the project was scrapped. All along, you were meant to destroy, created to help an oppressive institution reclaim your country and do nothing else. This news did not faze you.

Rather, once Kyuzo’s account concluded, you burned with new inspiration. It was thanks to your former mentor before you that you had not perished with the others, so it was now your duty to use your life for the force of good; those things which had once been intended to bring destruction, all of your gifts and abilities (including a fluency in all languages), were now going to create. Kyuzo taught you about the concept of Dust that same day (for he and his former coworkers based much of their research on old Oblation Board texts concerning the matter), and only then could you fully grasp the state of the human condition: it was like the whole earth had been spread like a map out before you, and you could see the lights of consciousness winking out all over it; for the rest of your life, you would help to make Dust, thus preserving wisdom for all of humanity.

But first, you needed to head back to Kong. Music, after all, was your specialty even in those days, and you and your phoenix had been reborn into a band that would soon become one of the greatest. Already, ideas for Gorillaz’ second album were drumming like thunder in your brain, and neither you nor Hibiki could wait to send Dust shooting out like sparks to catch fire in the masses’ minds.

\--  
And before that, there was a bit of spring cleaning to do. The building was much more decrepit than you remembered it being, and hordes of the undead had infested the place - zombi that had been granted the mercy of true death first. So you and Hibiki had to spend a few months as exterminators, re-killing all the flesh-eaters and enduring all the discomfort that entailed (your daemon was certainly glad to abandon having to be squeezed into your Hazmat suit, among other horrors, once the whole business was done). You didn’t mind it all that much, though, for you in your enlightened state could make a valuable experience of even this ordeal; in these soulless monsters, you saw both the landfill of carelessly-made schlock that was the pop music industry and the state all consumers would fall into if they kept feeding on such crap, and so you never forgot your work.

Once that ended, of course, the meat of the task was begun. There was so much to do, writing lyrics and recording samples and ringing up collaborators, and you threw yourself into it, not giving yourself any rest except to eat and sleep. Your Hibiki was miserable during all of this, so whenever he could, he’d pester you while you worked, always as some kind of monkey; you loved him and you knew he was just trying to help you, but it was still hard not to smack him whenever he snatched a lyrics sheet away from you or screeched over your playing in the recording studio.

“Damn it, 'Biki, don’t you realize how important this is?” you asked him one night as you lay in bed, him crouching over you as a macaque and playing with your hair while you tried to sleep.

“But we never have fun anymore,” he replied quietly as he crossed his arms and pouted. “We’re not happy. I don’t see what good making music is if it doesn’t make us happy.”

“It doesn’t matter how much we don’t like working,” you told him, sitting up and placing an arm around his shaggy shoulders. “We must do this because it’s our duty as artists. We have to remind the world what good music is, or else they’ll carry on listening to what might as well be white noise. We can’t let consciousness die that way! Now let’s go to sleep, we have much to attend to tomorrow.”

He still sulked, but he nodded and curled up as a tanuki next to you as you lay back down. You gazed at him for a few moments, stroking his neck and letting your heart feel your soul’s sickness. “It won’t be forever, Hibiki,” you whispered to him before cuddling him close and closing your eyes.

\--  
And indeed, it wasn’t - or at least your loneliness wasn’t. Soon enough, the boys returned one by one, having got the word you sent them and decided they were bored enough to be up for one more album. Hibiki was visibly excited to see them all again, switching forms almost as swiftly as he used to when each one arrived, and this was how you realized just how much you missed their presence; much more work could get done with them around, and even though you were well aware of all their individual flaws now, their company almost felt like it did in the older days.

2D, for one, was more or less his usual self - pleasant and generally unaware of things around him - so your relationship was much the same as it had been. The zen bond was still there, the same feeling of easy companionship that allowed you to sit by him without saying a word and still walk away feeling like the interaction was satisfying (though it didn’t feel quite as profound as it did when you were young and innocent - you now knew for certain that it couldn’t compare to the connection you and your daemon had). And barring that, you could speak English now, so the two of you could talk to one another and joke with each other and enjoy all the same things other siblings could. He even said things which gave you pause for their profundity sometimes.

Then there was Murdoc. He was just as grumpy and smelly as he’d always been, and you were plenty aware that his filth wasn't merely surface-level, but you found that your opinion of him had actually improved in an odd way; perhaps that had been because you were now a visionary genius whose speech was intelligible to him, thus making you less of an annoying-child-and-reluctant-uncle pair and more of a duo of consultants. He did have interesting things to say whenever he wasn’t too busy grumbling or too drunk to speak at all, even when he did get on your nerves with his teasing.

And, of course, there was Russel, big and quiet and just as kind as you remember him being. You and Hibiki were overjoyed to have his arms and Caden’s feathers to run to and seek comfort within again, and you were even happier to find that he, like Murdoc, had a mind that was inclined to big ideas (though without any of Murdoc’s condescending, vulgar attitude). There wouldn’t be much going out to have ice cream between concerts anymore, you knew already, but there was now plenty of discussion to be had over philosophy and politics and art, so that which was lost would quickly be made up for. You did notice that there was something different about him which concerned you - a sadness etched into his features that couldn’t be accounted for by his usual melancholic nature - but he was there, and he was your best friend again, and thus you were happy.

So there you were, all four of you, a dysfunctional family once more and ready to re-introduce yourselves to celebrity culture. And you were in charge, a Robin Hood with his merry men beside him and his robin on his shoulder. The world wasn’t ready, and you most definitely were.

\--  
If anything, working with the others this phase was even more interesting than it was with the last one. As you soon learned, things were, in fact, very different with your bandmates this time around. There was much to discover about them which you had no idea about before, that was for certain.

One such experience began when you entered the recording studio one morning to see Lilimit perched on the head of Murdoc’s bass - with no Murdoc beside her. Nothing was wrong, apparently; she simply looked up in startlement as you came in, and then she threw back her head and cawed in laughter at what must have been the looks on you and cat-Hibiki’s faces. Her human came back in a few moments later, and upon one look at you, he promptly joined her, coughing and wheezing so hard that you wondered whether or not you should help him.

“It was another of Satan’s welcoming gifts, love,” he explained to you once he’d completely calmed down, holding out his arm for the raven to glide over to as if nothing was strange at all about the distance she crossed to get to him. “Right after we got our new names, he separated us. I’ve been meaning to tell you lot, but I s’pose it just slipped me mind.”

“Interesting,” you remarked. “Did it hurt?”

“No, not at all!” he replied. “He didn’t have to tear us apart or anything! He just weaved his black magic right where we stood, and it was done. Truly a generous man, he is.”

Among other things, he went on, this ability allowed him to get out of the prison in Mexico sooner rather than later: according to him, everyone there thought he was a shaman, so he’d work bogus cures on them in exchange for small payments until he had enough to buy his way out of jail. You had to agree that it all sounded very fun, but you wanted to know why he couldn’t just become a proper shaman instead of going through all the trouble of selling his daemon to Satan.

“Aw, shut it,” he replied. “Best deal I ever made in my life. For one thing, her new name sounds a lot better than her old one did. _Nothing_ deserves to be called ‘Myfanwy,’ I can tell you that much.”

“Yeah, and it was even worse ‘cause he’d call me ‘Fanny’ all the time,” you heard Lilimit mutter under her breath.

He had other strange stories to tell, too, and whether they were true or not, Hibiki loved to listen to them. This particular tale was told when you were fourteen, and around that time was when Hibiki underwent something of a corvid phase, striking poses on your shoulder as a carrion crow and always wanting to know how smooth and sinister he looked.

\--  
This was also the phase during which it became more evident that your bandmates were kind of miserable behind their comedic appearances. You didn’t find it hard to believe at all that 2D, for example, would feel dead inside from overindulgence in fame and subsequent disillusion therewith, but it was still troubling to notice how different Thalia looked from her human’s seemingly content appearance. Her four little hand-paws seemed to clutch even tighter at 2D’s body, and if it was possible, she seemed even less responsive now than she had years ago; all she ever did around you was hug her person’s neck and gaze out at nothing in particular with her big sad eyes, always seeming lost in thought.

You longed to know so much about the strange little primate. Hibiki would have asked her so many questions - what she thought about, why she was so unhappy, how she got blue fur - had he not quickly figured out that she would respond to none of them. You could only recall one time you ever heard her speak, and that was to comment on something 2D had told you one evening while the two of you watched the sunset up on the roof, listening to the song of distant crickets; he’d supposed aloud that maybe people made music as a way to call out to like minds in the hopes of alleviating some sense of loneliness, and to that, Thalia had said (barely loud enough for Hibiki to hear), “Maybe someday it will work for us.”

Luckily, you could ask 2D himself some of these questions, and he answered them; for example, he told you that she turned blue the same time his hair did, following some accident which occurred a few years before he settled. But other than that, his daemon was still a gloomy mystery to you, a creature who drove your own daemon mad because he wanted to help her and he had no clue how. At least there were some occasions on which she seemed to be okay - when the “Dirty Harry” video was being filmed, for one, where she sat on 2D’s keyboard rather than on him and looked like she wasn’t anxious or confused for once - and those reassured you that the work you were putting everyone to would result in something good.

\--  
Then there were the times your bandmates taught you things about life that you had never truly considered. One of these was when you and Russel were walking down the hall one evening after a recording session, the other two having gone to bed long before while you and he stayed behind to edit tracks. You’d finally garnered the courage to ask Russel if he was upset over anything, and he finally revealed to you that Del had been taken from him.

“The Reaper finally came for him while I was on the outskirts of Los Angeles,” he told you. “I knew I was possessed, but I never actually got to see him until he was pulled from my body that day. And then…” Here, he sighed. “He was gone.”

“I can only imagine what it is to lose a friend like that,” you said in an attempt to comfort him. It was all you could say, for you knew he wouldn’t want to dump the weight of all his grief on your shoulders.

“It’s tough, alright,” he replied. “It really is tough. We were tighter than brothers, me and him.”

You’d ask him small questions about Del from time to time after that, always worried about whether or not you were prying. He always answered them, though - what foods he liked the best, their favorite spots to jam at, how he was when it came to dating, whether the two of them ever did drugs - so you must have always been okay.

Eventually, he even told you what Del’s Seymauro had been like. He had been a daemon who laughed at everything, long before he settled as a hyena; he laughed at his own jokes, at angry teachers even when all other pupils were deathly silent, as he goaded the still-unsettled Caden into chasing him around as a lion. But the sanguine creature could also be impressively still and soft, like when he curled up next to Caden while Russel recovered from an apparent schizophrenic episode, or in those moments when the four sat together after a jam session and he just stared at Caden, at Russel, with this profound fondness in his eyes.

“The way he looked at us, it was almost like you could see this great longing,” hooted Caden softly as you sat with them on the roof this particular night. He paused for a long while as he stared out into the night like his human, his eyes as dark as Russel’s were pale. And then he added, “You know, I settled the night after they died, the night Del possessed us.”

Later, Hibiki asked you if you though Del and his daemon could still be reunited someday. This time, you told him it was impossible, that spirits went to the realm of the dead and daemons dissolved into thin air, that the tale of a way out was little more than myth. But oh, you wished.

\--  
Soon, the years were passing by once again, and fame with all of its trappings and traps had you all tangled up in it once more. Your work was sending far greater ripples out into the world than the band’s previous album had, and you took no modest bit of pride in that fact; after all, you were saving the world in a way, weren’t you? Your life, full of oddities though it was, might have even been a weird sort of perfect save for the fact that Hibiki never settled.

Oh, discontentment took a very long while in coming, and it didn’t arrive instantly upon waking up one day. From your childhood, you had known that your daemon’s adult form would only emerge when whatever was behind Dust decided you had come to the right point in your unique journey, and you were having so much fun this phase that you never questioned this piece of wisdom. But each birthday came and went, and Hibiki was still a fox, a finch, a marmoset, anything but one single form. By the time you were in the middle of your sixteenth year of life, soon to exit the period of time at which most teens find their true selves, you couldn’t help but feel a bit impatient. Weren’t you wise enough to become an adult yet? Hadn’t you found your most important task, created plenty of Dust already?

“You know it doesn’t mean anything, right?” asked your still-innocent soul whenever you found yourself questioning. “Murdoc, after all, says he settled at age twelve, and is he a paragon of wisdom?”

This helped, but not completely. After all, you knew Hibiki still enjoyed being able to change, and change he did, every day, wearing a different shape every turn of the hour. You tried not to pay attention to it, because all it did was remind you that you were still a kid.

Eventually, you decided that you could only work out this issue if you had some time to yourself, so you began making plans to go on vacation. Perhaps another bout of traveling was just the cure you needed for your stress; even a seasoned explorer would surely find many things left to learn about the world, and just maybe, you thought, a few more experiences would help you to settle at last. Besides, you were feeling sort of homesick as of late; you were definitely going to try to work a few months in Japan into your travel plans as well.

You approached Murdoc with your request, and after a bit of negotiation, he agreed to grant it on the condition that you shot one last music video and played a small part in one of his schemes. So a few weeks later, you were high up on your floating island, all your belongings packed back home and ready to leave once you were done. For a moment, you nearly forgot you would soon be facing bullets as you sat on the cool, damp grass and looked down at the far-away earth from your sparkling, cloud-bannered palace. It was such a shame that this island would soon be destroyed, for you had been thinking it would make the perfect vacation home. You felt so close to Heaven up here, so near to the source of Dust; and at the same time, as you watched Hibiki swoop and soar all around you, surfing on different wings each time you glimpsed him (his final form would just _have_ to be some kind of bird), you found your spirit rejoicing at the gift of your innocence. Maybe you even wished that this moment would never end...

\--  
But it did. Horribly.

You were hiding somewhere in Kong’s basement right after the crash as Murdoc had ordered, cupping a radio and Hibiki the shivering dormouse close to your breast and waiting to hear that it was okay for you to come out, when you heard terrible things nearby. You tried to reach Murdoc, Russel, anyone who might have been listening, but the connection failed you, and then the creatures burst through the door of your room. Fierce claws came from the pitch-darkness and grabbed you - grabbed Hibiki, too - and no matter how you or he slashed and punched and bit, their strength and your nausea defeated you. Then you were both borne out, through more rooms, Hibiki snarling and hissing as a honey badger, until there was a red glow and the smell of burning and - oh no. Not _here._

Hibiki was dumped on the floor right as you reached the rim of the Pit, but you were carried right over it, you would be taken down. The shock of horror sent you into one last burst of desperate action, lunging and kicking and scratching and twisting as hard as you could to escape the demons’ grasp and reach your precious daemon, who was screaming your name and fighting just as wildly to follow you, his body an unrecognizable blur of the fiercest forms he could think of. But the distance grew between you, and the searing pain in your chest burned hotter and hotter, and soon your dearest, your strength, your light, all you ever truly had in the world would be gone.

Right before the flames swallowed you up entirely, you watched Hibiki leap over the edge and land just inside the charred opening of Hell - only to leap back with a yelp as though shocked by an electric fence. And then all you could do was scream for him, scream and sob for your Hibiki until your throat went hoarse, and let endless tears fall from your cheeks to sizzle in the fires below.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey-oh, here's Chapter Two! Might have to edit the tags to include a warning for violence and feelings of despair ‘cause of the ending...
> 
> Daemons introduced in this chapter:  
> *Kyuzo has a docile species of tarantula, maybe a Brazilian black or a Chilean rosehair. Spiders in general are calculating creatures who have been known for surprising displays of tenderness towards their young. Also, I wanted an invertebrate for him because those daemons seem to get a bad rep and it’s not fair. >:T  
> *Seymauro was a spotted hyena, the clown of the African savannah! This species is aggressive, true, but it's mostly the females who do all the aggressing, isn't it? His name came from playing around with a French saint's name. Oh, and the form was suggested to me by InsomniacFlaaffy, so thank you for that!  
> *I thought that maybe Satan would've renamed Murdoc's daemon as well as changing his middle name, so I gave her a name which totally wasn't ripped from the first Decemberists song to come to mind, honest. (My apologies to anyone actually named Myfanwy. I actually don’t think that’s an ugly name at all)
> 
> And yeah, I tried to squeeze some concepts from the books (the Magisterium, Dust, etc.) into this chapter. Don’t know how well this could actually fit into HDM canon (for example, Hell isn’t exactly the world of the dead, even though reference is made to Lyra’s adventure as if it were…???), but hopefully it can still work for the readers. Provided you’re willing to suspend your disbelief long enough.
> 
> Well, thanks for reading, and thanks also for any concrit/kudos! :DD


	3. Chapter 3

After that, there was nothing. Oh, Hell was far from empty - on the contrary, the place rang so loudly with screaming and weeping and the roaring of fires that your head always felt close to exploding, and the claws and fists of demons gave you fresh scars and bruises with every fight. But far more than any of that, you remember this horrible sense of nothingness. Down here, you were as far from life as you could imagine being; there was nothing familiar, no sunshine, no purpose, no friends, no Hibiki, not even a sense of passing time in this place. This was all wrong, you shouldn’t have been down here...you were not dead, you weren’t being tortured with the other ghosts, the demons never let you forget it...you didn’t belong here...

But none of that mattered. You might as well have been dead. After all, you were totally alone down here, with not even your daemon to cuddle close, much less Russel or Murdoc (not that you wanted that selfish bastard near you ever again); none of what you had done in the living world, not even your great work, would continue on without you, nor would it matter; and every good sensation you ever felt, every scrap of joy and sadness and wisdom and love, was quickly fading from your memory, being licked away into ashes by the flames all around. All of your life before this point, you had never truly considered that you wouldn’t be immortal somehow; and now here you were, feeling all the treasure you had stored up being robbed from you and being unable to even call yourself a full person anymore. You might as well have forsaken all you had up there - your work, your bandmates, everything worth anything - and waited to die and be put to a punishment like all the other spirits down here.

And yet, you kept fighting. You never stopped trying to escape, even long after your hope for anything to escape to was gone. Because no matter how hard you could try, you could never forsake Hibiki. The hole he left in your heart never ceased to hurt, always throbbing together with your head and your muscles and your wounds. He was still up there in the living world, probably in just the same pain as you and vulnerable to all sorts of danger besides. And if there truly was a way out of Hell, then you were going to find it so that when you both died, you could at least be near his cloud of atoms. So it was for naught but your beloved candle that you braved a furnace.

\--  
Hell seemed endless and impenetrable, but still you searched. Your bones felt like crumbling into cinders and you lost more blood with each fresh wound, but you never let fatigue win your battles. You would find out later that you spent three straight years searching and fighting, but to you, there were only paces covered and enemies defeated to mark the passage of time. You weren’t even searching intelligently for an escape so much as letting your fury and the throbbing in your ribcage urge you constantly forward, as if the fabled portal to outside was exerting some pull on you. There simply had to be a way out, because you _willed_ it, because your love for Hibiki would not have anything divide the two of you forever. 

You only came out of this burning trance when you looked ahead and realized that the great throne of Satan was before you, vast and imposing and with the Prince of Evil himself glaring down at you from where he lounged on it (you must have fought your way through the guards without knowing it). He congratulated you on your fighting prowess, and as a reward, he was willing to grant you any one request you had - though perhaps with a price of some sort tacked on. And just like that, all of your anger and determination crumbled away to reveal the utter desperation beneath, and you leaped at your chance like a rabid dog: you collapsed onto your knees and asked, nay, _begged_ to be released back into your world, swearing to pay any price, no matter how great, you would fight a thousand more demons or be put to the greatest torture or do anything else in all of the worlds so you could hold your daemon in your arms again (only you wouldn’t sell your soul, you thought - never your poor lost soul). You went on and on, blubbering shamelessly and almost incoherently, until at last you lay prostrate and boneless on the stone floor. There was the longest silence after that, and then you weakly raised your head to see Satan smirking thoughtfully down at you.

And then you were running back, dodging past demons as you dashed into the direction of the now-unbarred entrance to Hell, urging your numb legs onward across the great distance until you were finally scrambling up out of the Pit and flopping onto the ground beside it.

And then...then it was silence and darkness for the first time in years, a flood of blessed silence that swept through your poor dry body and left you weeping with its sweetness. It was so quiet compared to down there, and the darkness was so wonderful after the constant burning light, and oh, the floor beneath you was so refreshingly cool that you pressed yourself against it as much as you could in spite of how dusty and dirty it was. All you could think about for the longest time was _relief…_

You were in for quite the shock when at last you decided to get out of the basement and check out the rest of the building - you had expected your bandmates to be gone, but not all of Kong Studios as well. You emerged to find yourself in the midst of rubble and ruin, and sunlight was filtering down through millions of dust motes, and a chill breeze came to encircle you, and oh, you had no idea how you could ever have been willing to turn your back on this wonderful living realm for any reason. Well, here you were - exhausted, dehydrated, a filthy scrap of a girl, but somehow still alive - and no matter what you were going to do from now on, you knew for sure that you were never going to leave again.

And then you remembered: Hibiki! Where was he? Certainly not here, for surely he wouldn’t have stuck around while the studios were being demolished; you even gave the ruins a little sweep-around just to be sure. But it was no matter. You would find him. You would search to the ends of the earth if you had to, for that would be no trouble at all to a seasoned explorer who had fought all the legions of Hell. As you stood on the lonely hilltop under a cold blue sky, you took one last look back at the place which was once home, and then you turned to face the wasteland spread out below and started down the slope.

\--  
So after cleaning yourself up in a washroom somewhere and finding some striking new attire (complete with a mask - surely, someone might be after a famous guitar virtuoso once it got out that she wasn’t dead), you were once again wandering the earth - all alone, and with nothing but vague intuition guiding you, but able to manage this time. Yes, the ache within you had never abated, and on top of that, your nakedness and strange outfit earned you many looks when you traveled near well-populated areas (accompanied by many whispered questions - were you a witch? A faery? A demon, even? At least nobody seemed to be after you). But you were still a whole human, still a conscious being capable of your own decisions, and you knew that you likely had it worse in an alternate timeline. Hibiki was probably proud of you, you figured.

Months went by, and though your search took you across continents, you found no trace of your daemon anywhere (although sometimes you got this peculiar feeling that he was somewhere nearby, hiding just outside your line of sight). You did, however, discover some of your bandmates’ whereabouts as you looked. You heard the story unfold on radio stations, saw it in videos that were released: Gorillaz had returned, and it was even crazier than ever. 

You weren’t sure what you should make of it. While the music was admittedly very good, you were not impressed in the least by Murdoc’s performance at the helm of the project, and part of you wanted to abandon your old coworkers to their shit and get on with your search; it wasn’t like the band was destined to be your life’s only work, anyway. But you couldn’t just forget about them entirely; every day, you found little memories creeping back to you, and you soon realized just how much you had missed them all, even Murdoc. And eventually, from this part of you - a remnant of what had been torn out, you figured - came the idea that Hibiki might be headed towards Plastic Beach, so you decided to change your course of action. Besides, Murdoc was probably in dire need of an ass-kicking.

And so within a week, you were on board an ocean liner (you had bribed one of the personnel to sneak you into a room), sailing on a course that would hopefully pass by Point Nemo.

\--  
And a few days after that, you were collapsed inside a lifeboat and drifting slowly away from the sinking ship. Misfortune had befallen the passengers in the form of airborne pirates (were they after you, or was it a coincidence?); the Tommy gun you had smuggled aboard just in case turned out to be most useful, but you were ultimately outgunned and thus had no choice but to abandon everyone else to their fates (you sincerely hoped they all made it out alive). You swore you could have seen something else in the air as you faced down the marauders - a skua, or maybe a frigatebird, divebombing their choppers and trying to help you fend them off - but then you had to swim for it, and you didn’t see him again after that.

For the next few days, it was nothing but seawater all around, vast and deep and undrinkable. Most of your time was spent lying there in your raft and sweltering under the sun’s unforgiving heat, although sometimes a glimmer of hope would rouse you to rear your head and peer out for any sign of either your destination or your daemon (he had to be nearby, any seabird's cry or glint of fish scales could belong to him); you never glimpsed either, so you didn’t do this too often.

But you didn’t remain lost and lonely for longer than that, for from the deep ocean arose a friend. He was enormous now - for a moment, you thought a giant undersea mountain had burst up underneath you - but once he had your dingy in his oversized hands and you could see him, there was no mistaking his warm, thoughtful face, and his owl - still his normal size - eagerly swooped down from his vast shoulder to greet you. Caden immediately faltered when he saw no Hibiki beside you, and the look of worry on Russel’s face made you wonder if even now his love for you was grappling with his natural revulsion at a daemonless human. But he whispered to you that it was okay, and he let you hop into one hand where you were cradled in soft warm palmflesh, and you were safe and alright and hopeful once more.

You were a long way from Plastic Beach, according to him, but that distance would easily be crossed with his help, so off the two of you went, you clinging to his scalp while he swam and Caden flew beside you. There wasn’t much talking after that point (even when his face wasn’t underwater), but for all of his silence, you could easily sense that he was pissed at Murdoc and wanted revenge; however, while you certainly shared that desire, you have to admit that you were more excited to see the rest of your family (and hopefully your daemon) for the first time in years than anything else.

\--  
You didn’t see your daemon anywhere on the trash island - you looked, too. Nor did you arrive to much of a family; all you found of your once-beloved bandmates were a daemonless old man gone half-crazy from isolation and booze, his daemonless robot bodyguard who was clearly malfunctioning and required much effort to restrain (regrettably, your fight with her drained all of the energy you were planning to use in the former’s ass-kicking), and a singer locked in an underwater bunker with a daemon who was practically catatonic. Well...at least they were all in the same place again. That was good, because the mysterious Black Clouds set in a mere day after your arrival, meaning you had them to cozy up to while you waited for the sun’s (and your flame’s) return.

Strangely enough, for all of your anger at the man, you spent most of your time around Murdoc and his cyborg. In any other circumstances, you suppose you would have felt nothing but disgust for them both; not only had he abandoned the idea of combing Hell for you and thought he could replace you with a faulty toy straight out of the uncanny valley (couldn’t he have at least given her a hologram projector? Gotten her a dog?), but he himself had lost the only thing that would outwardly distinguish him from a rotten ogre, so it might have been okay to punish him for awfulness that was fittingly inhuman. But you yourself were no longer a full human, and these other half-humans were the only ones in no position to detest your animal appearance (Murdoc didn’t even look surprised when you first found him), so you reluctantly resigned to the comfort of their presence.

One day, on a whim, you asked him where Lilimit had gone off to, and he told you he had no clue. According to him, she’d flown the coop (so to speak) about a year earlier, about the time when he was done setting up his mock tropical paradise. “Perhaps she wanted to see that Cortez was alright, I think I left him behind in the Winne,” he joked (while you restrained the urge to kick him in the knee). “But seriously, love, don’t be worried. This ain’t the first time she’s gone missing.”

“When was that?” you asked.

“Well, lessee, that was...hmm…” he began, and you weren’t sure he was scowling from the effort of recalling information. “It was...it was when we were first separated.”

“Really? But...that had to have hurt, and you said...”

“Not physically, no,” he said, nearly a spit, and it was after a long while that he sighed and continued. “It’s no great matter, daemons just tend to run off when their people choose to separate from them. Something to do with wanting them to feel guilty, if I remember it right. Didn’t yours do the same?”

“I didn’t _choose_ to leave my Hibiki, dicknose,” you retorted. “He knows that, and he’ll be back any day now - more than I can say for your filthy bird.”

“Oh, not with these clouds all around, he won’t,” he growled back, and then you left the room.

So it was understandable that you liked Cyborg’s company much better. She had even less to say than you did, and the random spark-spitting could be annoying, but until she went nuts and forced you to kill her (which happened months later), she didn’t attack you once after the initial confrontation. All you really did was sit quietly together when she wasn’t doing something for Murdoc, and she’d stare at you, study your face and limbs, sometimes tentatively poke a finger at your skin. Her creator had told you about the strange connection she seemed to express towards you, so you weren’t surprised. What it must have felt like to be this amalgamation of clone and circuit, wondering at herself and everything in binary code, you could only imagine. She even seemed to know what a daemon was, because according to her master, on the few occasions she got to see 2D, she’d stare at him and Thalia in just the same manner. Poor thing, if only she wasn’t evil...

Speaking of him, you certainly didn’t forget about 2D. The time you didn’t spend with the no-daemons club was spent in his room, with the curtains always closed because he was still not entirely sure that the whale had left. When you first found him, he seemed to take a long while to realize who you were, and when he finally did, you could just see the fear spreading across his face; and Thalia was an especially pathetic sight, no longer merely hanging on to his neck but rather squeezing his torso for dear life and pressing her face into his chest, her once-bright fur all damp and dingy. But even through the haze of so many pills, even through unfamiliarity and frightening appearances, the two of you must have still been able to recognize something of a zen sibling in one another; you still sat together in that dark bunker, sometimes watched movies, sometimes even noodled around with melodicas, and it felt to you that at least a small thread of the peaceful bond that once was had not yet snapped.

The fact remained, however, that he wasn’t well. He never said much about his own troubles to you, but one night, while he was napping and you were sitting on the bed next to him, his daemon looked up at you and spoke for the second time ever. “We were really hoping the band was over for good,” she whispered, her pitiful eyes staring right past you into some fog of memory. “We might have been normal for once.”

If not for the fear of violating her human, you would have liked to pick her up and cuddle her. Not only did she look so in need of a loving touch, but her words had made you wonder whether Hibiki would have told you the same thing, and you wanted something to help you forget his absence.

\--  
Day after day, the Black Clouds lingered, never once breaking. In the mornings, you would sit outside with Russel and stare out at the rolling darkness, keeping a melancholy vigil; when you went to sleep each night, you were visited by dreams just as murky; and all of your thoughts, sleeping or waking, involved Hibiki in some way. Where was he now? Would he really be unable to find you in the treacherous mist? Suppose he might have settled by now - as what, and would you like it? Would things ever truly be the same again?

Darkness yet reigned over the island, and your impatience grew, and there were points at which you felt like simply letting despair claim you and casting yourself into the sea. But you always pushed that thought out of your mind, for that was what Hibiki would have done. You could have almost heard him at times, telling you that these were no kind of thoughts for someone who fought through Hell, that he would always be looking for you even when he could no longer swim or fly, and that what would happen next was irrelevant because it would all be figured out once you found each other again. You couldn't help but believe every imaginary word; after all, you couldn’t see the sun either, but you knew it was still shining, so you knew your fire was too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this was a long time in coming. I was meaning to post earlier, I really was, but a bunch of stuff was going on and I lost my focus. Likely as a result of the schedule slippage, this chapter feels quite a bit more disjointed to me than the other two did, or perhaps that was just how my thoughts were as I worked on it...
> 
> Yeeah, I realized the presence of the Hellpit might have made my speculations on the door between the worlds of the living and dead a bit confusing. Probably because it was only a little ways through this chapter when I realized I hadn't thought at all about just what its presence would mean in a pseudo-HDM AU. Er...imagine it being a closely-guarded entrance instead of an exit, would you? That might fix it.
> 
> And towards the end there, it looks a bit like I'm teasing a 2Nu pairing, if I'm not just imagining things. Take it however you like, only know that my intentions for that were nothing beyond subconscious. ^^
> 
> Well, hope you like it, and I promise the final chapter will be up within a week! Thanks once again for any concrit/kudos. ^.^


	4. Chapter 4

You can only guess at how he’s doing now, but you’re positive he’s at least alive and kicking - after all, you haven’t dropped dead yet, of course. It’s been a week since you and the others found this place (certainly no neighborhood jewel, but it would do), and you’re still a body alone; but at this point, you hardly ever notice it, as unbelievable as that would sound to your younger self. If this most recent reflection on your life, and especially on the past few years, has taught you anything for certain, it’s that you can’t ever expect much predictability: it was by chance, after all, that you and Hibiki had entered a life where you became a worldwide icon, then a philosopher who traveled the world, and finally a warrior who braved Hell itself, all long before you’ve even turned twenty-one; in an existence where even this point of relative normalcy is still quite bizarre, you suppose you really should have expected to become a witch, voluntarily or not, at some point. Perhaps Hibiki might tell you it’s a sure sign of your strength, for surely whoever controlled destiny wouldn’t have let such things happen to someone weaker; you aren’t so sure of what he would say if he were here, and you’re not even sure how he feels towards you anymore, but you try to be optimistic.

“It’s nearly midnight, baby girl,” whispers Russel, up on the roof beside you, and the rumble of his voice is plenty enough to bring you out of your thoughts (he’s beginning to shrink, at least). You don’t feel all that tired, but you guess it’s no use staying up with nothing else to do, so you kiss his hand and cautiously make your way down to the window of your room. It’s cold as always when you step inside, and you know the bed’s going to feel like a board underneath you, but you probably aren’t gonna live here for more than a few months, anyway; briefly, you wonder if Hibiki will be waiting for you wherever you move to next, but you let the thought die quickly, because it will do you no good.

You’ve just walked back in after cleaning up in the restroom when you notice a flicker of movement beneath your bed. It was so slight that it could easily be written off as a trick of the shadows, but you’re not so sure. Slowly, you kneel and lift up the bedskirt, and you peer underneath to see... 

It can’t be. It just _can’t_ be, not after all this time and disappointment. But you can clearly see the shape of something vaguely feline in the darkness, its faintly gleaming eyes staring warily back at you, and you can think of no other explanation. You’re paralyzed for a long while, all of your astonishment and joy and worry welling up as a lump in your throat, and then you manage to choke it down and whisper: “B-Biki?”

He starts to come closer, and you back away as he slowly crawls out into the glow of your nightlight. He still crouches there, gazing up at you with an uncertain, imploring look, and the feeling of unease is too uncomfortably thick. “It’s me, Hibiki,” you whisper gently, holding your arms out towards him. “You’re home now.” He still refuses to move, and your worry grows. What if he’s damaged? What if your bond’s damaged?

But then the warm, impish look you’ve missed so much once more glints in his dark eyes, and all at once he springs at you and cuddles into your arms, chirping ecstatically. You eagerly press your face to your dear soul’s body, and you’re giggling with happiness through the tears which soak into his fur, and then you fall back onto the bed to let him roll around all over you and lick your flooding eyes. So many words, so many questions, are threatening to likewise spill from your lips, but you decide those are for later. Now is for reunion.

Hibiki, on the other hand, is letting his muzzle run over with things to say. “Oh Noodle, my Noodle, I’m so happy to see you again! It’s been far too long, I should have waited, but I couldn’t, Noodle, I had to leave, and then I got lost, I looked all over for you, but I just couldn’t find you! Lilimit found me, and she helped me home, but it took such a long time, and it’s all my fault. I’m so sorry, Noodle, I promise I’ll never leave your side again, I love you so much…”

“Biki, _Biki,_ please!” you have to say at last. “It’s okay, it wasn’t your fault. I’m just so happy you’re back, and I’ll never leave your side again either.” You finally sit up and pull him off of you so you can appraise him. You have no idea what he is now, but he’s absolutely gorgeous. He looks so lithe and graceful, with a long body and deft-looking paws, and you simply adore his spotted yellow coat, especially all the bold rings on his long, sinuous tail. His tapering head is perched on a rather absurdly-long neck, but his sharp eyes and alert ears make up for the goofiness quite well. He certainly seems to like this form, because he hasn’t changed once…

“Do you like it?” he asks, and only then do you realize you’re staring. And right after, the more obvious realization hits you.

“Er...well, yes, but...what are you?”

“I don’t really know,” he replies, and he falters a bit. “I was actually kind of hoping I’d end up as a mongoose, or maybe a tamarin, or - ” 

You put a finger to his lips, and then pull him back into your arms. “I think you’re perfect, Hibiki,” you whisper before kissing his forehead. He’s all you’ve ever had in this world, and he’s always been perfect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Told you guys I'd be quick with this one! It's a short one, as I've promised, but it's (hopefully) sweet and satisfying.
> 
> Hibiki's settled form is an African linsang, a mysterious viverrid (the family of civets and genets, distantly related to felids) that lives in the trees and eats little scurrying things. Viverridae, in my opinion, fits Noodle because of the secretive and guarded (yet resilient and opportunistic) nature that many of its members share. I also considered herpestids (mongooses), felines, foxes, mustelids, primates, and even corvids, among others; perhaps one of these families would fit better in your opinion, I dunno, feel free to tell me your suggestions if you want. 
> 
> Well, there's my fic. I hope all of my readers enjoyed it, and kudos/critiques are very much appreciated! <3


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